8/31/2015

Okay, fine, so we're supposed to pretend to take Donald Trump seriously and continue to indulge this fantasy so narcissistic that Kanye West has called him to take that shit down a notch. Well, then, let's do it. Let's say that Trump actually has proposals worthy of consideration beyond "Are you fucking kidding?" If you go to his website and click on "issues," there is still only one: immigration reform. That's it.

And if you read it, you'll see that Trump fully believes (or doesn't - it's hard to tell what shit he actually believes and what shit is just expediency for the moment) that "solving" the problem of undocumented workers will solve pretty much every other problem in the country, from terrorism to poverty. It's so fuckin' miraculous that no one ever thought before to scapegoat one group and order their purging. It cures all that ails a nation, no?

Beyond actual, seriously-stated proposals like that we should economically sanction and diplomatically isolate Mexico until that nation pays for a 2000 mile border wall, what's most fascinating are the links to articles that make up the "research" that's gone into the plan. No less than half a dozen times, Trump cites the conservative news port-a-potty, Breitbart, which means either he's paying good money in exchange for blow jobs and clicks or he just doesn't give a shit what his sources are.

'Cause, see, for example, Trump offers the kind of proposal makes stupid people smile stupidly because they think it's common sense: "Use the monies saved on expensive refugee programs to help place American children without parents in safer homes and communities, and to improve community safety in high crime neighborhoods in the United States." And he links to two Breitbart articles. For "high crime neighborhoods," he sends us not to crime statistics or even a report of criminality. No, we get to click over to an article that is a summary of a caller to Laura Ingraham's radio ear bleeder. No shit, it's a woman claming to be black and living in Baltimore who says she wants asylum from crime in her neighborhood, which may well be true, except if you're passing it off as news, you motherfucking confirm that it is a real person with a real opinion and not some fucknut who wants to hear their bullshit on the radio. But for a presidential candidate to use that as a demonstration of the effects of high crime rates is laughably absurd, if we still had the capacity to find all this absurd anymore.

On it goes. Another link is to a Breitbart article that is, shit you not, a reprint of an abstract of a study, along with the first paragraph of the introduction. In other words, the article's "writer" didn't even bother to read the fucking study about how immigrant workers affect native workers in the United States. One other frightening thing comes out of looking at Trump's "research." Most of these articles are about the effects of documented and undocumented workers. In other words, it's not just an attack on "illegals." It's an attack on immigrants coming here and taking our jobs or some such fucked-up lie.

This isn't an indictment of Breitbart. If you go to the circus, expect to see heaps of elephant dung. But it is an indictment of Trump, who doesn't give a fuck who his "experts" are. You been on TV saying shit Trump likes? You're hired. Who the fuck cares if you're associated with white supremacists. And it's an indictment of the knuckle-dragging yahoos and racist opportunists who see in Trump their idiot god who says what they really want said.

Sure, sure, we can pretend that these are serious proposals. But if we do, we have to seriously contend with the hatred from which they spring and the hatred that they provoke. We have to seriously understand that a large contingent of the Republican Party is no longer hiding its racist anger. Instead, it's out in the open. We thought that would make it less frightening, if we could see its face and hear its awful words.

8/28/2015

"I don't wanna write about that. I'm tired of thinking about it," said one of the Rude Pundit's New Orleans friends when he asked the woman to post on this here blog about the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the storm that caused the levees in New Orleans to break, allowing cataclysmic, murderous floods to ravage that place and many others. "Why does it matter that it's been ten years? Every day is another anniversary." Her family had lost three or four houses between all the members. She lived a damn nightmare.

He reached out to another buddy, an old friend, a writer and photographer, who responded, "I'm just keeping my head low and not following it at all. It makes me crazy." He meant that it depressed the hell out of him, and it was hard to blame him. He had been chased out of his home by the storm and came back to help rebuild the town.

The Rude Pundit tried several times this week to write something, but he found that he couldn't articulate what he was feeling. New Orleans isn't back to its old self. That doesn't exist anymore. What does exist is, to a large extent, "New Orleans," a pretty authentic imitation of the place, but just off enough that, if you knew it before, you know it's far, far different. The town is still one of his favorite places in the whole country, the whole world, so maybe when you love something so truly, so tragically, it becomes hard to catalog the good and bad ways it has healed after a near-death experience.

He's going to try again to come up with something worth saying, something about remembering how a Republican administration let the city drown and rot, about how it ripped the bandage of race relations off and we're dealing with the bleeding to this day, about how it demonstrated that neglect of infrastructure is a crime, about how the culture is still amazing but missing so many elements that made it whole, about how the school "miracle" is, to a large extent, smoke and mirrors, about how poverty has become far worse while property values skyrocket. Maybe he'll be able to articulate something. Or maybe he'll just pass on this one.

Or perhaps he'll wait until he returns to New Orleans in December, as he generally does, as he did December 2005, when the Rude Pundit and the Rude Brother took a drive through the circles of Hell, from the North Shore of Lake Pontchartrain through St. Bernard Parish and into the Lower Ninth Ward, to see the destruction first hand.

You can read those posts here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5. There are many, many photos, interviews, and on-the-ground reporting, including a view of the barge that ended up beached in the middle of the Lower Ninth.

Back then, he wrote, "The resurrection of New Orleans seems as if it's calculated to create a Disneyfied version of itself, where only the parts that matter to outsiders are developed, those that can be made into simulacra of the real thing." For a great deal of the city, that is true. And for many, certainly for outsiders, that is good enough. It might be time to let the old city go and grapple with what comes next.

8/27/2015

Sometimes, it's the easiest thing in the world to figure out just how dumb a person is. For instance, here are two sentences from a letter from Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, the world saddest animated giraffe, to President Barack Obama regarding Obama's visit to New Orleans today to mark the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Jindal didn't want Obama to mention climate change:

"While you and others may be of the opinion that we can legislate away hurricanes with higher taxes, business regulations and EPA power grabs, that is not a view shared by many Louisianians.

"I would ask you to respect this important time of remembrance by not inserting the divisive political agenda of liberal environmental activism."

Can you wrap your head around that without it exploding? After attacking the President politically, Jindal asks Obama not to bring up something "political." You got that? Put aside for a moment that bringing up something that pretty much every scientist accepts as fact isn't exactly "political," how the hell do you take two completely contradictory sides without getting whiplash? It's like Jindal sucker punched Obama and then said, "I ask you not to throw punches because that'd be mean." That's not just dumb. It's pathologically, insistently stupid.

Jindal continues, "Furthermore, the people of Louisiana have already agreed upon a pragmatic and bipartisan approach to preventing and mitigating the damage of future weather systems." Yeah, sure (although the usefulness of that plan has far less support than the reality of climate change), but who exactly is financing all the plans? It sure as shit ain't broke-ass Louisiana. Oh, right, it's funded by the billions of dollars that came from the federal government.

In other words, who the fuck cares what Bobby Jindal wants said?

Towards the end of his letter, which is about as a effective as a flea fart in a hurricane, Jindal smirks, "Partisan politics from Washington, D.C. are unwelcome in Louisiana at the best of times. This week it would be met with nothing but derision."

Huh. Before his speech today, Obama had given an interview to WWL-TV where he said, "We can build great levees. We can restore wetlands. But ultimately, what we also have to do is make sure that we don't continue to see ocean levels rise, oceans getting warmer, storms getting stronger." And yet all the people at his speech didn't react with derision, unless hugs and tears are now an indication of contempt.

That's because the people of New Orleans know better than Bobby Jindal what the deal is. They know that without any real action on climate change, the city is fucked beyond fucked, and all the mitigation and restoration plans will mean jackshit. Yeah, that mighty plan Jindal touted was based on "low-balled" estimates of the effects of climate change when the what's really predicted to happen is that shit's gonna get drowned by, perhaps, 2062. Says one scientist, what we do about carbon emissions in the next 30 years "will determine whether New Orleans is inhabitable during the 22nd Century."

But let's not taint the whole memorial with politics. It'd be unseemly.

8/26/2015

There's a sentence from a Los Angeles Timescolumn titled, "Why Clinton's email problem won't go away" that's so ironic and so galling that it ought to be put on a poster in every media outlet. Here it is: "It's difficult to avoid the suspicion that Clinton, after the scandals that rocked her husband's presidency during the 1990s, simply did not want to leave behind a paper trail (or e-trail)."

Context is everything, dear children, and the writer, John Schindler (a dick pic-sending right wing assmunch), is leaving out a huge part of the story. See, all those "scandals," Travelgate and Filegate and Whitewater, were utter bullshit. They were worthless wastes of time and money by Republicans (and cowardly Democrats), and their only purpose was to isolate, degrade, and destroy the presidency of Bill Clinton, that hick punk who thought he could just saunter in and lead the nation. If they also took down his bitch wife who thought she was smart enough to solve the health care crisis, all the better. If not them, then any collateral damage of their friends and associates was just dandy.

The only thing that approached an actual, real "scandal" was Clinton lying under oath about getting blowjobs and cigar-banging an intern in the Oval Office. That came out of the Whitewater investigation and it had jackshit to do with the presumably shady land deal in Arkansas. The entire impeachment saga was because of a tangential question and, ultimately, it was the same giant trash pile that every other fake "scandal" was.

While most of the public didn't give a single fuck about the Clinton scandals, the Republican base and the party's donors loved it. They gobbled it down like it was jizz from Jesus's own dick. And conservatives across the country pretended that the United States was being victimized by the immoral bimbo fucker and his castrating spouse. God, how they made bank on it all, how evangelicals lied openly about the sinful, adulterous, murdering, raping, drug-using Clintons. It was a goddamned carnival of molesting clowns and shiv-wielding carnies. And press outlets just jumped on the rickety scandal roller coaster because the GOP had bitch-slapped them into believing the "liberal media" canard. "We'll show you how we're not liberals," they announced. "Please, tell us more about missing Rose Law Firm documents and we'll act as if the fate of the entire motherfucking republic depends on it."

We have been a pathetic fucking country for a very long time.

Which gets us to the scandal du jour, the inevitable digging up of something, anything, to sew onto Hillary Clinton's clothes. The scarlet "B" for Benghazi wasn't holding. But, oh, happy fortune, the bullshit investigation yielded the info on the private email server, and the Clinton Industrial Complex went back into high gear. Let's get the "E" out there.

When the Rude Pundit first heard of the private email server issue, his initial thought was "Oh, c'mon" because he knew what was coming. But the one part that's been left out of the story of why Clinton used the home server (which was not fucking against the law) for her State Department emails when she was Secretary of State is the complicity of the Republican Party and the media in making Clinton so paranoid that she felt she had to do so.

Of course, she was going to do anything to keep her communications out of the public eye. Of course, she was going to make life complicated for any congressional investigations. Why the fuck wouldn't she? What the hell did she get the first time around? A discussion about her husband's dick on the floor of the House of Representatives. An accusation that she had a friend murdered. Why wouldn't she just say, "Go fuck yourselves"? In fact, she should have said that at the beginning of this. She should have said, "Well, no shit I used my own server."

Frankly, Hillary Clinton's pretty goddamn fearless to be putting herself through what was going to be an inevitable slog through the GOP fake scandal swamp.

Note: None of this excuses Clinton if she committed any real crimes (and not just violating the "spirit" of the law, which everyone does every day in many, many ways without being dragged through piles of dog shit for it). But, so far, sorry, she hasn't. Offering unsatisfactory explanations for one's actions is not illegal.

8/25/2015

Throbbing anthropomorphic hemorrhoid Roger Ailes, Fox "news" chair, stepped up like a sweaty ogre in Galahad's tight armor to defend his woman, sneermistress Megyn Kelly, from the snotty tweets of the walking wart, Donald Trump. "Apologize!" the hemorrhoid demanded of the wart. "Stop saying mean things about our good and noble and true journalette." The girlfolk need a champion. They can't be expected to risk mussing their hair, Ailes believes.

"Suck it," replied the wart. "Suck my bald balls and lick my tasty taint." We shall have to see which pustule will win this war. Either way, we end up sticky and vomiting.

You know, though, for running a network that spends a decent percentage of spring covering the "horrors" of Spring Break in Florida as an excuse to show abs and tits, Ailes is mighty uppity about the respectability of his "news" hosts.

Fox "news" can dish it out - attempting to undermine, attack, and smear every so-called "liberal" media figure. But it can't take it.

Mostly, Roger Ailes should just shut the fuck up. He should shut the fuck up because the odious Megyn Kelly can probably handle Trump herself. Frankly, Ailes's defense of her is far more sexist than anything Trump has said. And he should shut the fuck up because everyone knows that his outrage is merely fodder for more ratings. What's better than Trump snarling at Fox? Fox snarling back. Everyone gets the coverage then.

Kelly is the Fox woman of the moment. When he's done with her, Ailes can sit, pantsless, behind his desk and buzz his secretary to order, "Bring me another blonde. This one's gone slack."

8/24/2015

Listening to the Republicans running for president, you'd think that we live in a blight-ridden hellscape filled with Mexican rapists taking our jobs by shooting us all to death while breeding anchor babies, crazy Muslims trying to behead Christians on street corners while atheist liberals applaud their devotion to their culture, and tyrannical Hillary Clinton flouting email rules while personally murdering Americans in Benghazi with Planned Parenthood fetus parts, not to mention the Iranian nukes ready to rain down on us at any second (or ten years from now, whichever comes first), China dragging us into the sea of financial ruin while loaning us more money, families falling to pieces because Mom says she's always been a man and the kids are on Obamacare, and the military ready to take away everyone's guns before forcing us all to give up our coal and gas-burning ways to please the so-called "scientists" who think they're so smart. And it's all because that asshole Barack Obama is too weak, like that fucking pussy Jimmy Carter, because he refuses to bomb the shit out of any countries that fuck with us.

There's Jeb Bush, who is haunted by Islamic extremism (and Donald Trump), telling us, "The reality is that radical Islam has been spreading like a pandemic – across the Middle East, throughout Africa and to parts of Asia, even in the nations of the West, finding recruits in Europe and the United States...Who can seriously argue that America and our friends are safer today than in 2009, when the President and Secretary Clinton – the storied ‘team of rivals’ – took office? So eager to be the history-makers, they failed to be the peacemakers." (He didn't mention his brother at all in this speech, by the way. And George Bush is pretty much the reason we have ISIS in the first place.)

There's Ted Cruz screeching in that cartoon parrot voice of his at a "Rally for Religious Liberty" in Des Moines, "There is a war on faith in America today, in our lifetime. Did we ever imagine that in the land of the free and home of the brave, we would be witnessing our government persecute its citizens for their faith?...You have endured the pain, endured the attacks, endured the hatred, that precisely put you where you are here today...You want to know what this election is about? We’re one justice away from the Supreme Court saying every image of God shall be torn down.”

There's Ben Carson, talking about the use of missiles to blow up shit along the border with Mexico: "[I]t's possible that a drone could be used to destroy the caves that are utilized to hide people. Those need to be gotten rid of...Those caves are very evident. And I hope you have some of the sheriffs in. They can show you the pictures. They can show you what is going on there. We are not getting support from the federal government to deal with these people. They're being outgunned. You know, 56 percent of that border is not under our control."

Fuckin' caves? We gotta worry about caves filled with Mexicans now? (He probably meant "tunnel," but then you're getting caught up in "words" having "meaning," as Carson might complain.)

This could go on. Hell, any speech by any candidate, Trump or Christie, Huckabee or Jimmy Ballsucker or whoever the fuck else is running. They all paint a picture of a nation that is teetering, just barely hanging on, before falling into an abyss.

Shit's gonna kill us. Shit's gonna get to us somehow and kill us. That much is sure. But chances are that you will die a thousand times from weather caused by climate change or unsafe food or environmental poisons or guns you own yourself than you will be affected in any way by ISIS or Mexican rapists. But the GOP won't talk about that. They won't talk about the real denial of rights, like the treatment of African Americans by law enforcement or the militarization of the police or sentencing laws or detention of immigrants, including the dreaded Mexicans (most of whom are not, in fact, interested in raping Donald Trump), people who suffer far more than a baker who won't bake a gay cake.

The Republicans will talk endlessly about this fake America. Because if they talk about the real one, they'll have to confront the real problems, not the made-up shit that pinches the anger and rage nerve in their Neanderthal voters.

8/21/2015

Anyone who comes from south Louisiana knew the truth immediately (if they were being honest): Of course, Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King is bi-racial. Of course, he could claim that he's black. The Rude Pundit grew up around Creoles of color in his city on the bayous. Every day, at school, at the mall, in restaurants, in bars, he saw people who looked like King: light-skinned (frankly, the white Cajun shrimpers had darker skin from baking in the sun), but with hair that looked, for lack of a better word, "black." Hell, one of his close friends had the same short buzzcut and pencil mustache that King sports. When the right had a blogasm over allegations that King was lying about his race, about his life story, the Rude Pundit is sure that many, many people in Louisiana thought, like him, "The fuck? Dude's black."

It's always pathetic when a parade of assholes attacks someone online, whether for being a woman who says women should be treated equally or for shooting a lion. It's doubly so when those assholes base their attack on lies, propagated by the pestilent fucknuts who run Breitbart, the Daily Caller, and the Blaze. Snopes has as good a summary of the whole circle jerk of fake allegations and unsourced rumors against King. It's a sad litany of nonsense.

King's eloquent response to his critics that reveals his parentage ought to put it to rest. It won't, though. Angry mobs are not noted for its ability to be reasoned with. Breitbart is already out with a story claiming that King actually confirms their allegations. That's not worth a head-slap. It's worth beating your head against a wall until you're unconscious from the assault of stupidity.

Obviously, this isn't about King. It's a way to discredit King's personal cause, police brutality against African Americans, and to destroy Black Lives Matter, which is having a real impact on the civil rights conversation in our endless presidential campaign season. It's the conservative way: make people associate an organization with something awful, even if that awful thing is completely false, and you can more easily wreck something you don't like, especially when that awful thing goes into the mainstream press. See what happened to ACORN? See what's happening to Planned Parenthood? Now Black Lives Matter is in the right-wing shit-flinging path.

Because, see, as Republicans are forced to respond to Black Lives Matter, the organization is validated as a real force, and that means its issues will have to be discussed. And once its issues are discussed, then solutions will have to be proposed (whether or not those solutions occur).

But the other reason Black Lives Matter needs to be squelched and silenced by the right is much simpler, much more mathematical. See, without Barack Obama running, Republicans must figure that the black vote would go down, which gives the GOP a better shot nationally. If Black Lives Matter keeps its momentum, that could easily carry into the general election next year and bring out black voters, which spells pretty quick doom for Republicans.

Yeah, the right could instead attempt to address the very real issues of violence, poverty, and lack of opportunity for African Americans. But it's just easier to try to silence them.

8/20/2015

Someone had better find out which of his mistresses Donald Trump forced to get an abortion, and they'd better find that out soon, because right now, Trump is no longer the GOP's Frankenstein monster. He's its Godzilla. Let Mexico cower under his green balls as the border burns.

Because, see, it doesn't matter if Donald Trump is a fucking idiot. In fact, in his CNN interview with Chris "The Less Evolved" Cuomo yesterday, Trump may as well have answered a question on how he gets his foreign policy information with "I sit on the toilet and, when I'm done having the greatest shit ever, really, it was something, you wish you could shit that way, I watch my gold-plated TV and learn everything I need to know."

Actually, take the bathroom out of the equation (even though you know it's part of it), and that's pretty much what he said: "I watch your show. And I watch other shows. And you have the best channels, the best everything...In all fairness, you know, what do I know? I'm a man that made a great fortune. I'm going to make our country rich and I'm going to make our great, but you know what, you do not get me the right generals and I'll see four, five generals. I'll see all sorts of people...I'll even stoop down the colonel stuff. You go all over the place. But you have a lot of different people and so are other shows and they're really good people. And I watched that and read the Times. And I read the Wall Street Journal. I know we have a lot of other news page. And I read magazines specially Time magazine this week because I'm on the cover. OK. So I specially will look at it. But I read magazines and I read other things. Yeah, sure I need a team but, you know, by the time you get to a problem, you know, we're talking a long ways away, it's going to be changed. You can have a whole different set of -- I mean different countries will be run by different people in all fairness."

You might think, "Surely, he's not going to double down on that, right?" You are not an idiot. Donald Trump is a fucking idiot who doesn't ever need to give a damn who tells him he's a fucking idiot. So Donald Trump can say, and mean, "I watched all of the shows, you get the best people, you know, because even the generals want to be on television, right or they're retired generals in many cases but I see a lot of good things by watching your show and other shows. And it's really nothing that we left that or scoff that...and you know what I do is when I watched without naming names but when I watched your different shows and you show a particular you're very in to this but when I watched the different shows, there were certain people that I really think are terrific that I can do better by watching and seeing and reading in the times. And then I know who I maybe want to speak to more so because you're not going to meet with 400 different people. So I do learn a lot by watching and I do learn a lot by reading the various newspapers and magazines and everything else and I really find it to be a fascinating subject."

Donald Trump is George W. Bush with no fucks to give. And people are lappin' up his brain pissings like it's fine champagne because we've degraded leadership to relatability. People relate to Donald Trump because he talks dumb like they do, and we think talking dumb is talking straight. It's not. It's just dumb. They problem is that dumb people are too fucking dumb to know that. Can't talk in real sentences? That's relatable. Doesn't need to talk to experts who aren't on TV? Fuck, yeah, that's relatable. Much better than that prissy Negro, Barack Obama. Christ, Trump is the candidate from Breitbart.

Trump is also a fuckin' liar. Here's what he told Cuomo about an award he received: "I was given the biggest award by the marines the other day. It's just about one of the biggest civilian awards by the marines the other day. I was with all of the marines. I was with the head of the Joint, the new head of the Joint Chief of Staffs. He's a very impressive guy at the Waldorf, Missouri the other nigh. I was given, you know, one of their most distinguished awards which is a great honor for me."

Turns out that Trump was given a bullshit award because he donates a shit-ton of money to a charity called "the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation." It gives college scholarships to the children of Marines and federal law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty. It's not even associated with the Marine Corps. It's a civilian organization. Of course it was a civilian award. Trump's either inflating the honor to give him some military street cred or he didn't even know what it was.

Fuck it, though. Who doesn't mix up the awards they've gotten for the $100,000 checks they write? Just like regular people.

8/19/2015

So this guy, Rick Wilson, GOP consultant, commentator, what the fuck ever, went on CNN to say that the 25% of Republicans who support Donald Trump are knuckle-dragging troglodytes who shit in ditches and call it gold. Or words to that effect.

Conservative spooge sock John Nolte writes about it on Breitbart (motto: "Andrew Breitbart may have been a coke-snorting monster, but he sure was a coke-snorting monster"), and, predictably, the Breitbart minions - the trolls and goblins and lepers and syphilitics who make up their Comments section - go on the attack and, predictably, take it too far, not only referring to Wilson as a "jewfag," but threatening to rape his daughter.

Wilson, understandably upset at the threat that women on the internet deal with every day (except it's towards his daughter and not him because, ew, rape a dude? That's so gay), lashed out at the aforementioned spooge sock. They even got John Podhoretz and Ann Coulter involved because, at this point, this has become an amazing clusterfuck of wretchedness, like a ball of spiders floating in open sewage. You don't want to help them because fuck that. Let them all drown in shit. By the end of the day Monday, Wilson had backed off attacking Nolte because, hey, no one wants anyone raped.

"But, wait," you may say, "you promised us anal." The Rude Pundit did, so bend over while he delivers with the following Twitter exchange:

Ann Coulter jumps in to mock the threat of rape and Wilson counters with his, c'mon, hilarious comeback, calling Coulter a hooker. (For the record, anal always costs more.) There are so many dicks and cunts involved in this story that it's pretty much a blood orgy for the soul of the conservative movement.

Wilson later deleted the tweet because everyone knows that Coulter's anus is lined with teeth-like calluses.

While the dissension on the left has to do with how Black Lives Matter confronts Democratic candidates, the dissension on the right is a sad showdown between the Barking Mad and the Merely Insane. Lock 'em in a room. Whatever happens then, everyone else wins.

8/18/2015

Because no presidential campaign season is complete without at least one photo of a candidate deep-throating tube-shaped "food" in a corn condom, here is Jeb Bush going down on a deep-fried Snickers at the Iowa State Fair:

The amount of time candidates spend in the fields of the shit kickers in Iowa is inversely proportionate to how much of a fuck we should give about Iowa's caucus. But that won't stop anyone from pandering by engorging pig balls on a stick or rectally-inserted beer-battered pickles or whatever the fuck Marco Rubio and Hillary Clinton have to pretend to enjoy.

From another angle, it looks like JEB! is gagging on the down home treat:

An adviser is telling him, "You swallow that shit, bitch. Lap up every drop." That's how democracy happens in this degrading century.

8/17/2015

In some ways, it's a sad waste of time to write about Mike Huckabee, currently running for the GOP nomination for president. He doesn't have a snowball's chance in global warming of winning. His whole campaign reeks of self-promotion to keep Huckabee, Inc. in business for another few years. You can boil down his entire reason for running to a slogan: "Mike Huckabee: Because Who Doesn't Want a Cruel Prick Who Sounds Like a Backwoods Ass Rapist for President?"

Speaking of rape, Huckabee is one of several Republican yahoos running who don't think there should be any exemptions for rape victims when it comes to abortion. Huckabee was asked point blank on CNN about whether or not a 10-year-old rape victim who got pregnant should be able to get an abortion. You gotta give Huckabee credit: When you're a motherfucker, you're a motherfucker all the way:

"I think what we have to do, Dana [Bash], is remember that creating one problem that is horrible -- horrible -- I mean, let nobody be misled. A 10 year-old girl being raped is horrible. But does it solve a problem by taking the life of an innocent child? And that's really the issue."

Putting aside that, while the now-11 year-old girl in Paraguay gave birth by cesarean section, apparently without immediate complications (except for that whole being raped by her stepfather, going through with the pregnancy, and giving birth at 11, for fuck's sake), it was likely that the pre-teen would have extensive issues. Why did her health not matter? Why did her ability to have a life after being raped not matter? Huckabee made a judgment: the fetus was more important than the child who carried it.

Then Huckabee went to the scoundrel's argument about abortion. Hey, you might be aborting a Superman/Mother Theresa hybrid who will cure cancer and save a busload of children from falling off a bridge. "I know people. I worked for a man for several years, James Robison, who was the result of a rape. His mother went to three doctors in Houston, Texas, in 1943, begged doctors to abort the baby. None of them would do it," Huckabee explained. "They all refused. Today, his organization feeds, cares for, and brings living capacity for water to hundreds of thousands of people across the world. That would never have happened, Dana."

The Rude Pundit's said it before and he'll say it again: That's goddamned nonsense. There's also a chance that rape kid could grow up to be Ted Bundy. The possibility that a potentially aborted fetus will grow up to be the world's savior is a fantasy at best, a deliberate, manipulative, bullshit lie at worst. But Huckabee was a TV preacher once, and lying comes easy to a man who looked into poor people's eyes and told them to give him money because he can help them live on a cloud for eternity after they die.

But Huckabee wasn't done. "[L]et's not compound the tragedy by taking yet another life. And I always think we sometimes miss the fact that, when an abortion happens, there are two victims. One is the child. The other is that birth mother, who often will go through extraordinary guilt years later, when she begins to think through the -- what happened with the baby, with her." Except the woman is not a victim. She's a patient who made a choice and is almost guaranteed to live her life satisfied, even happy with that choice. Again and again, Huckabee discounts the agency of women in favor of making them baby-shitting machines.

Finally, Huckabee says the most easily disproved thing: "I just come down on the side that life is precious, every life has worth and value. I don't think we discount the intrinsic worth of any human being. And I don't know where else to go with it, but just to be consistent and say, if life matters and then that's a person, then every life matters." No, every person is not precious. Every life doesn't matter. Everyone doesn't get a trophy for being born, let alone just being conceived. See Ted Bundy remark above for proof.

What we're witnessing is a snake oil salesman talkin' down to the rubes and yokels off the back of his pick-up truck, a charlatan who wants you to know that life is precious as long as men are controlling the lives of women.

8/13/2015

(The Rude Pundit is on the last night of his beach time, eating steamed shrimp and washing it down with Pacifico, a fine choice to help fall into the torpidity of the evenings. But he's got time for a quickie with you.)

The Rude Pundit isn't 100% sure what a Debbie Schlussel is or what she does, so let's just say she's another goddamned conservative word-puker who hates Obama, jizzes for Israel, and doesn't give a shit who has spent his life trying to make the lives of the poor around the world just a little bit better.

Yeah, Jimmy Carter has advanced cancer. At 90, it likely means he's not long for this world. On principle, the Rude Pundit doesn't have a problem with mocking the dying or the dead. He's certainly done his share. And while it seems a bit weird to call Carter a "cancer" for building houses for people, as well as eliminating diseases that have devastated third-world nations, if that's what floats your rickety boat on your river of shit, fine.

But at least be interesting about it. Or clever. Or nuanced. Or anything other than just thuddingly, dully, dumbly insulting for the sake of insult and an idiotic hashtag.

8/12/2015

(The Rude Pundit is nearing the end of his beach adventures, like diving near a sea cave to look at beasties today, but is still managing to jam in a bloggy bit or two.)

You may have seen the photos from the protests underway in Ferguson, Missouri, for the first anniversary of the shooting death of Michael Brown. You might have seen the four white guys who are distinctly not cops but look like dudes who name themselves things like "Shotgun Jake" and "Phil the Patriot." They are members of the Oath Keepers, a bunch of bizarro fucknuts who like to walk around with their guns hanging out to remind everyone they love America more than anyone, especially you, you fuckin' commie Negroes.

The quartet of gun ghouls claims they are there to protect "reporters" from Infowars, a bunch of bizarro fucknuts led by Alex Jones who never met a conspiracy theory they wouldn't deep throat. Which would still be creepy and unnecessarily confrontational, but is even more so because Infowars told Reuters, "Yeah, no, fuck these guys. Not with us."

Faster than you can say, "Um, what would happen if a bunch of open-carrying black men said they were there to defend a BET reporter?" gun nuts jumped in to add their voices to the "Whoa, whoa, there, Shooty" opposition to the Oath Keepers' presence in Ferguson. At the sexy-named, ultra-pro-gun site Bearing Arms, Bob Owens writes, "They interjected themselves into a community where they were neither
wanted nor requested, and raised tensions instead of assuaging them."

He quotes another gun-lovin' blog, Gun Free Zone (ha, it's facetious, get it?), "Go away. I don’t care if you really were a Ranger or if you only played
one online, you are fanning the flames and making the rest of us look
bad. And before you call me a hypocrite, the Koreans on the rooftops
during the LA Riots were defending their business, not patrolling the
streets looking like a Blackwater contractor guarding a VIP in the Green
Zone. Go home and get out of the spotlight. I don’t want to lose my
AR because you didn’t know when to leave yours locked in the safe."

8/11/2015

(The Rude Pundit is on a beach vacation, squeezing in a bit of blogging in-between burning his shoulders, swimming near a giant ray, and dolphin watching.)

You remember Sandra Fluke? It wasn't that long ago, 2012, when she spoke before a Democratic congressional committee on the bullshit of conscience clauses and the nonsense of businesses and colleges trying not to cover birth control in their prescription drug health plans. She was viciously attacked on the right as a "slut" who just wanted to fuck like crazy, despite the fact that what she was saying was that poor women need to have contraception covered, sometimes for things that don't even involve fucking.

You know who was right down in the trenches of the war on Sandra Fluke? Fuckin' Megyn Kelly, that's who. The conservative "feminist" we're supposed to defend now because Donald Trump said some bitchy things about her couldn't get enough of attacking Fluke. Indeed, you could make a case that it was Kelly's targeting of Fluke that pleasured Roger Ailes and got her the primetime slot she's in now.

For instance, on The O'Reilly Factor, March 8, 2012, Kelly said, "Ms. Fluke would have the world believe that she is somehow a victim because she is at Georgetown Law School and is not getting her contraception paid for by the law school."

Kelly couldn't get enough of trying to lash out at Fluke, indulging slut-shamers and snarking the shit out of Fluke, proudly declaring that her daytime show was the first to go after the Georgetown graduate. Even recently, Kelly joined in a hategasm with Ann Coulter over President Obama calling Sandra Fluke when she was being attacked but not the family of a murdered woman. So, you know, you're gonna have to count the Rude Pundit out of the whole "we should support Megyn Kelly" thing. It's not like she'd lift a goddamn finger for a woman on the left under fire from asshole misogynists. Hell, she'd likely just pile on.

8/10/2015

(The Rude Pundit is on a beach vacation for the week, so the blogging will be brief and hopefully satisfying enough, like elevator sex.)

Here's a quote for you from a Public Policy Polling survey done post-GOP clusterfuck or, if you want, "debate": "PPP's newest Iowa poll finds Donald Trump leading the Republican field in the state even after a weekend of controversy. He's at 19% to 12% for Ben Carson and Scott Walker, 11% for Jeb Bush, 10% for Carly Fiorina, 9% for Ted Cruz, and 6% for Mike Huckabee and Marco Rubio."

One way to read the poll is that of the top five GOP contenders in Iowa (motto: "You guys really put way too much stock in what we white people say around here"), three have never held political office. Imagine that. Imagine someone who has never been on a fucking school board all of a sudden have to be responsible for the lives of 300something million people, if not everyone in the world. Here's a question the Rude Pundit would ask Fiorina and Trump: Would either of you want as CEO of a company someone who has never run a business? And for Carson: Would you want to be operated on by someone who only knows about surgery from reading books and making speeches about it?

You don't pop your anal cherry all at once. You don't shove a giant dildo up your butthole when it's the first time. You start small. You work your way up. Otherwise you're facing bleeding, tearing, or rupture, no matter how prepared you think your anus is.

By the way, another poll has Trump at 24% with Bush following at 12. Fun times, motherfuckers, fun times.

8/07/2015

1. There was one absolutely amazing moment at the first (well, unless you count the asterisk debate before) GOP presidential debate last night. Governor Chris Christie and Senator Rand Paul were getting into a real rasslin' match over mass surveillance of American citizens. You can see what that looked like here:

Paul thought he had Christie on the insult ropes by bringing up the New Jersey governor's embrace of President Obama post-Hurricane Sandy. Christie shot back, "Senator Paul, you know, the hugs that I remember are the hugs that I
gave to the families who lost their people on September 11th."

And, subtly, ever so slightly, motherfuckin' Rand Paul rolled his motherfuckin' eyes. It was such a beautiful moment, expressing just for a moment what so many of us feel when some cockknob politician or another invokes 9/11 now, 14 goddamn years later, to justify their bullshit. Rand Paul may be batshit crazy, but he does not take kindly to fake sentiment.

2. What the fuck was up with compassionate John Kasich, the governor of Ohio? How the hell does he expect to get any votes by proudly proclaiming that expanding Medicaid was the right thing to do because, holy shit, it costs the state less than keeping mentally ill people in prison and poor people shouldn't have to be degraded? And he not only didn't shit all over same sex marriage, he acted like he had no fucks left to give about it when he said he went to the wedding of a friend getting gay married. If he had looked at the rest of the gathered frauds, sociopaths, and Trump and said, "Yeah, bring it, bitches," it wouldn't have been surprising. Of course, then he talked savagely about abortion, so fuck that guy.

3. While each candidate tried to gently woo the voters, touching their titties softly, then a bit more firmly, sticking his hand into their pants to gently, tentatively, even, caress their twats until they were wet, Donald Trump just said, "Fuck this," lubed up his hand and arm, and started fisting the shit out of the GOP audience. Some were appalled, slapping him away and telling him to get lost. Others were curious, spreading their legs and seeing where this led. And still more jumped up on all fours and told him eat out their assholes while he was at it.

4. Honestly, how does anyone listen to Ted Cruz for any extended period of time? He sounds like a mynah bird without the charm and surprise. He looks like a dick, sounds like a dick, and puts forward dickish policies where he's appealing to the dicks everywhere. Frankly, fuck Trump. The GOP should be trying to stomp this geek-nosed cocksucker out of the race.

5. Ben Carson sounds like an NPR host on quaaludes. Mike Huckabee sounds like he's gonna fuck a mule and call it freedom. Jeb Bush looks like your divorced seventh-grade math teacher you knew was checking out the legs of the girls in the front row. Scott Walker still looks like he'd stare through a hole in the barn and jack off while he watches Mike Huckabee fuck a mule. And Marco Rubio? The desperation that poured from his face would have been sad had it not been utterly earned.

6. How could any woman or non-white person come away from that debate feeling anything but depression, loathing, and fear?

(Note: You can read most of what the Rude Pundit thought over on Storify, where he's put his live-tweeting of the event.)

8/06/2015

1. The Rude Pundit remembers when Jon Stewart took overThe Daily Show because he had been thoroughly enjoying the program with Craig Kilborn hosting (Colbert and Carell were already correspondents) and was a bit pissed at this pretender to the louche, smarmy Kilborn's seat. Stewart was an MTV stooge, another celebrity blow job giver, and a decent stand-up comic. When Stewart finally settled into his role, when he took the show as his own and molded it into the truth-telling, Swiftian, Rabelaisian, Twainian, Carlinian machine it became, no viewer, including this one, ever thought about Kilborn again.

2. To this day, the Rude Pundit remembers the episodes during the 2000 election national nightmare clusterfuck, when Stewart said, "You know, when we named this 'Indecision 2000,' we were joking." It was a perfect moment, when the surreal reality we were living exceeded the possibilities of satire and the wave of ludicrous actions just had to be surfed. And The Daily Show rode it deftly, hilariously, and meaningfully, becoming the only damn news show, fake or not, to fully embrace the absurdity of the greatest nation in the history of forever not being able to rationally decide who the hell was leading it.

3. When the BBC interviewed the Rude Pundit for some goddamn bizarre reason after Stewart announced his retirement, they asked him for moments that he'll remember. He said that two came to mind. One was the first show back after the 9/11 attacks, when the persona dropped and a Jersey guy mourned for his adopted city. The other was more recent. Yeah, Stewart just mocked the way online new sites declare that he "eviscerated" or "destroyed" one thing or other when, really, it was just a few good jokes. But when he took on Glenn Beck, with the chalkboard, ludicrous glasses, and strange gestures, he genuinely took apart one of the most dangerous men in the media, ultimately helping to drive Beck underground.

3a. When John McCain stopped making regular appearances, it was a bit sad. Stewart humanized McCain in a way few have ever been able to.

4. Stewart dated the roommate of a friend when they were all students at William and Mary. The friend said she couldn't watch The Daily Show because "That's just Jon Leibowitz, who'd sit in our room, smoke dope, and make jokes all the time." (Just some trivia.)

5. Many people on the left were pissed off at Stewart and Colbert's Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear just before the 2010 midterm elections. What they missed was that it was a hilarious prank, performed on a grand scale. Whatever sincerity Stewart pushed at the end, with the whole clumsy Lincoln Tunnel metaphor, was undermined by the giant, rather brilliant "Fuck you" that had come before. If you were upset that it didn't create a groundswell to turn the tide of the Republican wins in the midterms, then you weren't in on the joke. It was meant to mock conservative rallies and Tea Party gatherings, not make you feel better about the nation.

6. Stewart was never our crusader. If he was going to change things, it would be on a small scale, by bringing attention to issues like veterans' rights and 9/11 responders' health. He was our pressure valve, but his Daily Show wasn't meant to be cathartic, even though sometimes it was. It was meant to make you angry, really fucking angry, that shit was going this way. The problem was, as it always has been, that people are notoriously difficult to move to action. The best comparison the Rude Pundit can come up with is Bertolt Brecht, the German playwright. Brecht wanted his plays to enrage people into action at the injustices of the world, not just enjoy a nice time at the theatre. The problem was that the masses never left Mother Courage calling for an end to war. And people left Threepenny Opera humming "Mack the Knife," not ready to attack the capitalist pigs. So, of course, Stewart was, as he professed, just a comedian. Except when he wasn't.

7. Despite what he keeps telling us, "Jon Stewart" is dead after tonight, as much as "Stephen Colbert" died when that host's host moved on to the great network in the sky. Whatever Stewart does after, his persona of Daily Show host is gone. What we lose in that is perhaps more deep than the humor, incisive and broad, and the social critique. We lose a way to frame the world, even if that frame was in opposition to Stewart's obvious positions. We lose a way of understanding how we are being manipulated. By then end of his run, Stewart had earned our trust. He went from the smart-ass brother to the father a generation wished they had. "Jon Stewart" is dead. We shall never see his like again.

8. Yeah, yeah, of course, Stewart was partially the product of some amazing writing by his staff, and he surrounded himself with a terrific supporting cast.

9. Full disclosure: The Rude Pundit knows and has great affection for Daily Show co-creator Lizz Winstead, who now is fucking shit up with Lady Parts Justice, as well as being buds with a writer on the show.

8/05/2015

You've seen them, right? Rand Paul and his woodchipper and chainsaw of utter manly manliness taking out the tax code? Lindsey Graham and his slaughter of cheap, outdated cell phones? Ted Cruz wrapping bacon around his dick while he jacks off? All of them are trying to make effete politicians seem like they're masculine and tough and take no shit and give no fucks.

Now we have Bobby Jindal having a push-up contest against his imaginary adversaries: The issues and his hilarious 2009 State of the Union response. Filmed like a homemade gay porn flick, it features Jindal in shirt, tie, and slacks up against young people with t-shirts emblazoned with shit like "taxes" and "hypenated Americans" (no, really). Of course, Jindal "wins," as terrifying "fans" cheer him on in the tiny room.

Listen, sweet, dumb GOP candidates: Really confident men don't have to show off how macho they are. It's like being cool. The second you start telling people you're cool, you cease to be cool.

And if you think someone is going to vote for you because you seem down-to-earth because you used a samurai sword on a cell phone, your candidacy is already done.

But, hey, it's fun to go viral and compete with pet Vines and LiveLeak police abuse videos. You kind of fit right into the sweet spot of self-degradation between them.

8/04/2015

The Rude Pundit was trying to figure out his favorite image from yesterday's bullshit GOPalooza forum in Manchester, New Hampshire. The sight of eleven candidates in person and three on live feed from D.C. begging the voters of a tiny state that is 94% white to give them some Trumpless votementum was alternately nauseating, annoying, and hilarious. What they said is a pile of bullshit pandering to the gun-fellaters, spic-haters, and evangelical masturbators.

Instead, you could have enjoyed the floating head of Rand Paul:

But, for the Rude Pundit's money, this image of Rick Perry demonstrating the proper way to strangle poor people says it all:

8/03/2015

Yesterday, at Monmouth racetrack in New Jersey, the crowd was there to cheer home state horse American Pharaoh after the Triple Crown winner won another race. Stepping into the Winner's Circle, presidential candidate and Governor Chris Christie must have thought it would be his moment to bask in the glory of another large farm beast and receive a bit of adulation himself. Now, your average horse race fan is not generally a bleeding heart liberal, but they do know how to cheer for winners and how to treat losers. So they booed Christie, loudly, the kind of boo that only a large percentage of a crowd of 61,000 can make. Then they cheered the horse's trainer and owner who said Christie's name, which led to more boos.

This really happened. The governor of New Jersey was given a huge, audible hooting of derision from the crowd. Because the people of the Garden State now fucking hate Chris Christie. He is the big-mouthed motherfucker who promised to give a shit but turned his back on his state for the chance to lose a presidential race. He was supposed to be the straight-talking teller of hard truths, but he turned out to be just another vindictive bully. It worked for a little while, when Jersey wanted him to take lunch money from the feds for Sandy relief. But once Bridgegate and every other (so far minor) scandal took their toll, he went from being the bruiser Jersey loved to the Bluto it wanted Popeye to beat the shit out of. Christie was always a myth. He was always 300 pounds of shit in a 100 pound bag. Mythic images, though, are like Icarus (and sometimes they are exactly Icarus), and this motherfucker flew way too close to the sun.

So in Jersey, the state Christie has all but abandoned, the citizens are alternately amused and disgusted at his flailing campaign. Here's Christie, whose staff closed the George Washington Bridge as political retribution and who himself canceled a new rail tunnel that would have vastly improved life for the state's citizens, trying to say he's on the side of commuters when it comes to the incredible failure of his administration to do dick about the decaying mass transit infrastructure: "Here's the way we fix it. If I am president of the United States, I call a meeting between the president, my secretary of transportation, the governor of New York, and the governor of New Jersey."

You might think, "Hey, he's governor of New Jersey. Why doesn't he get a meeting with the other parties?" But then you're thinking with your rational brain and not your political pandering brain, which must calculate how many blow jobs the Koch brothers will require for every statement you make.

Christie the bully, the man who probably doesn't remember giving David Wildstein shit swirlies in the locker room at their high school, emerged again yesterday on This Week with Jake Tapper's Resting Asshole Face. Tapper asked, "During your first term as governor, you were fond of saying that you can treat bullies in one of two ways — quote — 'You can either sidle up to them or you can punch them in the face.' You said, 'I like to punch them in the face.' At the national level, who deserves a punch in the face?"

Without missing a beat, Christie said, "Oh, the national teachers' union," going on to explain, "[T]hey are the single most destructive force in public education in America. I have been saying that since 2009. I have got the scars to show it. But I'm never going to stop saying it, because they never change their stripes."

Drama queen rhetoric aside, a reflective man wouldn't readily admit that he wants to punch in the face a group that represents significant numbers of women. A thoughtful man might have said, "Democrats in Congress," just to spread the pain. A wise man might have said, "Well, I don't actually want to punch anyone in the face." Christie is neither. And asking a bully who he thinks the bullies are is like asking a public masturbator who the perverts are.

In Jersey, the citizens are gonna pop a cold one and sit on the shore and bask in the last month of summer. They will watch Christie's political death with the kind of joy one gets from seeing the asshole who revs his engine blow it out. They will await their chance to boo him again, ready to be in another arena and give a thumbs down.